


in the face of unconditional love

by MathildaHilda



Series: until the end of infinity [11]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, I had the theory that May survived the Snappening, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, POV Second Person, So it's not really Avengers: Endgame Compliant I guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-24 06:08:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19717786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: Tony Stark will stare at that sunflower with the orange tinted petals and the slight, chemical smell, no matter how many years have passed, and he will trace the smudges of finger-paint with a chipped nail and a bitten tongue.You will hold his hand, look him in the eye, and say ‘thank you’.He couldn’t save Peter, but he tried, and you can’t fault him for that.





	in the face of unconditional love

You’ve heard the words before.

Always the same words, from so many different people.

Your father. Your mother. April.

Jan said it sometimes, but very rarely, and little Annie never said it.

But someone always said it.

_(‘This is your fault.’)_

It’s not your fault.

It’s never your fault.

You’re not a magician, and you’re not a thief; you’re just a big sister, doing her best to protect those who are younger than you, and sometimes that means doing the bad thing.

Sometimes, it’s simple; it’ll never be enough.

It’s not your fault your father leaves.

It’s not your fault Annie dies.

It’s not your fault April leaves.

(It’s not your fault.

It never is.)

For a while, it’s always Johnny Jerome.

Always Johnny, with his sparkling eyes and surefire way of getting you exactly what you want.

Always Johnny, with the money and the words and the ways _and the world_. Always Johnny with the things you can never have.

(You won’t have the abundance of money, and your words will be lost somewhere between your throat and your mouth when you get emotional and scared.

The ways, _the roads_ to what you want, will forever be trapped behind what became important.

You won’t have a lot of things, but you will have more than enough.)

It’s always Johnny, until he gets caught with a bracelet in his greedy palms, and Ben Parker’s there to comfort you in your confused and distraught turmoil of whether or not that damned love was even remotely real.

It’d always been you and Johnny.

Now – in those few hours after Peter stormed out of the apartment and those few hours before you would both get back, shell-shocked and numb and Peter still soaked in blood and rain – it would always be you and Ben.

(It’s you and Ben, who bring Peter back, pack up the apartment with the yellow walls and cream-colored ceiling, and move everything downtown, where the only thing that will ever mean anything real to you, will live for the rest of your life.

You live there, stay there, when Ben dies on the street with Peter begging the dead back to life.

You live there, and stays there, when Peter begs Tony Stark to let him stay.)

Peter is five years old when you have to sit him down by the kitchen table, and tell him that his parents aren’t coming home.

You don’t tell him how, other than that the plane fell out of the sky, and that Richard and Mary didn’t make it.

(You know he’s afraid of flying, some time before he does it for the first time when Tony Stark pulls him away to Germany.

You don’t know, that he’s not afraid of falling.

Peter knows, he’ll always be afraid of landing.)

You hold him that night, and all the nights that come after, and he snuggles between you and Ben like only a child can, and it makes your heart ache with love and grief.

(Peter is almost never quiet, but right then, he holds your hand, and doesn’t say a word.)

You never wanted kids.

But, when Mary had told you – in whispered conversation so that your respective husband wouldn’t hear – that she was pregnant, you’d never think that you could love anyone as much as you love Peter.

He deserves the world, and more.

(It’s not the world that takes him from you.

The world makes him who he is, and the universe’s twisted principles in the hands of a mad man, rips him from you.)

The first time you’d heard the name Stark, it’d been your father complaining about the rulings of the upper classes.

‘Upper classes’, he called it. You just called them rich.

Your father called them privileged. You just called them better off than most.

The first time you heard the name Stark come unannounced from Peter’s lips – past the hyped conversations between him and Ben by the kitchen table – he’s eight years old and Tony Stark has just announced Iron Man to the world.

You hope, when you look at the boy you’ve come to talk about as your own, that the world will never be as unkind to him as it’s been to Tony Stark.

(No one ever quite get what they ask for.)

Ben didn’t know.

You didn’t know.

You desperately wish that you’d known.

Peter has cried in his sleep before; stuffed his face full of pillows and tiny fists until the sobs died down, and you willed yourself to stop worrying so much.

He’s cried before, after Richard and Mary.

He’s crying, and tucks himself against the crook of your neck, and holds fistfuls of your shirt in his hands, and Ned whispers a half-explanation of something no one ever wants to hear.

Ned stayed over, and you wish you had never left in the first place.

You bury your fingers in his hair, rock him gently, and Ben does the same to a tear-filled young Ned.

No one’s ever allowed to hurt your boys again.

(Steven Westcott is sixteen.

Peter Parker’s barely nine.)

Peter and Ned burns a hole in the dining room table at some point after Peter’s tenth birthday where you and Ben had saved up the money to get him a science kit.

Neither of you is quite sure just how exactly they manage to burn a hole in the wood with substances and technologies meant for two ten years old’s safe explorations of science, but it’s there, nonetheless.

The wood is charred, black around the edges, and wide until it’s no bigger than a fingernail once it punches a hole straight through the wood.

You think about repairing it, or throw the table out and buy yourself a new one, but Ben is hesitant about it. Hesitant, in much the same way as he is whenever you ask if maybe you should repaint the doorpost when the paint begins to peel.

Someone else repaints the doorpost with all of Peter’s growth spurts marked down in ink.

Someone else does that, but you keep the table, even after both Ben and Peter are gone.

Sometime, before Tony Stark gathers to courage to face you at your door, you trace the hole with a marker, and remembers Peter’s growth spurts now hidden under layers of white paint.

(Tony Stark will stare at that sunflower with the orange tinted petals and the slight, chemical smell, no matter how many years have passed, and he will trace the smudges of finger-paint with a chipped nail and a bitten tongue.

You will hold his hand, look him in the eye, and say _‘thank you’_.

He couldn’t save Peter, but he tried, and you can’t fault him for that.)

You remember the first time you met Peter, and the fear of dropping him that came with it when Mary gently placed him in your arms.

He was so small, with rosy cheeks and wide, brown eyes that wanted to see everything and more, and he had been so lively when you held that you couldn’t help but talk back.

A child’s laugh is among the purest things you’ve ever heard, and you wish for it to never end.

It takes Peter five months to laugh again after Mary and Richard, and you cry when he does.

They’re happy tears, but you still don’t let him see them.

Peter’s always been an odd kid, but who isn’t an odd kid when trying to figure out just who exactly they are?

You remember the first time you hold him in five years, after Tony Stark is cold and gone and your boy has a suit that shines in the sun.

He shakes, vibrates at a frequency you can’t quite tune yourself to, but you see the unfathomable grief; you’ve felt a similar one, just not three times over.

(Richard.

Ben.

Tony.)

You hold Peter long and hard, and even when five years have only passed for one of you, he clings to you just the same as you cling to him.

You thank Doctor Banner later, and shakes Pepper’s hand.

You whisper your silent thanks to a dead man when they lower his heart.

When you stare at the kid in his bedroom, dressed head-to-toe in red and blue spandex, a part of you screams that you should’ve known.

Peter’s fourteen when his uncle dies, and he’s just out of being thirteen when he gets so sick that he can barely bring himself out of bed. Your burnt soup stands untouched, and not even the poptarts in the kitchen is touched,

Neither you nor Ben asked much after the one stuttering reply he’d given, tomato-red and as acne-ridden as only fourteen-year olds can be, when all he’d said had been _“puberty”_ , and you had both left it at that.

Had you known that this was his _“puberty”_ , however, you would have seen fit to ask further questions of superhuman anatomy.

He’s not Spider-Man when Ben dies. He’s just Peter Parker, and the loneliest boy in the universe, when you find him later that night, hunched over in a chair.

He stares at his hands, washed clean of blood, and you had coaxed him to look at you.

Peter Parker, in your own well-chosen words, is as much a hero as Spider-Man.

To you – in the moment where there’s only the two of you in the whole world in a rundown hospital with an odd smell and flickering lights – Peter Parker is the closest thing you’ve ever come to meeting a superhero.

**Author's Note:**

> As of publishing this thing, I haven't seen Far From Home yet, so I hope it makes some sense, at least!


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